What would you say is the most shocking aspect of the Mike Amesbury affair? Mr Aymesbury is the Labour MP who has been suspended from the party after being caught on CCTV camera on Friday night punching a man to the ground and then hitting him at least five more times as he lay there, as bystanders ran to call him off. That he had spent the evening in talks with the local police team, residents and the Cheshire Labour Police and Crime Commissioner about “local policing concerns and priorities”? No, that just lends a rich element of irony, not to say, comedy, to the whole thing. That he was formerly an adviser to the feisty and pugnacious Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner and a former member of Labour’s policy making unit, the National Policy Forum? Not even that. The matter is now in the hands of the police and we are yet to see what consequences may follow.
Nope. The really despicable element of his behaviour as recorded on CCTV is not just that he punched a man who did not appear to have hit him; it is that he hit him repeatedly when he was down. You don’t do that. No decent man does. If you are stupid enough to get into a fight you should wait until your opponent is upright before you hit him. That used to be one of the accepted rules for non-thugs, one of the many with which this senior member of the Labour Party seems unfamiliar.
But there are other troubling aspects to the thing. One is that if it weren’t for CCTV, I wonder would the word of witnesses to the event have been enough to secure his suspension from the party? There’s no escaping what’s on the footage, and it’s online. Another is his remarks after someone shouted, “The MP for Runcorn f-g smacking someone on the floor”. To which Mr Aymesbury responded: “Yes, I am, yes I am…and you won’t threaten the MP ever again, will you?” We don’t of course know what was said to provoke his outburst, and he told the police after the event that he felt “threatened” but he seems worryingly keen to assert his status as MP. Granted, he may have been in a heightened emotional state, but to me at least, it’s indicative of a certain attitude of mind. As indeed was the response of Mrs Aymesbury, who told reporters yesterday to “p*** off”.
What worries me is that there’s a tendency in the current Labour party to play the working class card
Now, it would hardly be worth saying all this – stating what should be the obvious – if it weren’t that this unedifying spectacle took place just as Sir David Amess’s daughter gave an interview about the failings of the state, specifically the anti-extremism unit, Prevent, to protect her father from being stabbed by a suspected Islamist in his constituency surgery. She is angry, an understandably, that there hasn’t been a full public inquest into the failings of Prevent to do what its name suggests, viz, prevent dangerous extremists putting us at risk. Parliamentarians do feel threatened, especially in their contacts with constituents, which should be part of their normal work. What is not helpful in inculcating respect for MPs qua MPs is to have a senior Labour member behaving in the way Mr Aymesbury did and then shouting about being threatened. I knew Sir David Amess a little and I honestly can’t imagine him ever responding to aggression with aggression. He was a gentleman as Mike Aymesbury is not.
What’s more, Sir David was working class; what worries me is that there’s a tendency in the current Labour party to play the working class card – the way Angela Rayner did when she was pictured on a rave in Ibiza which wasn’t illegal but was undignified. Let’s hope Mr Aymesbury doesn’t sink that low. And let’s hope too that his constituents soon get the opportunity in a by-election to let their MP know what they think of him. It isn’t a good look for the Labour party.
